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Product Description

Publication Date:September 26, 2011

Industry:Consulting

Industry:Media

Source:Harvard Business School

Brightcove, a technology and services provider to content owners in the Internet television field, aimed to become a media distribution company in its own right. On October 30, 2006, it relaunched its Website-and, in effect, its business. With its new, consumer-facing home page, and with new offerings for advertisers and affiliates as well as video publishers, Brightcove sought to build a four-sided business (or "platform") around the rapidly expanding online video industry. Simultaneously, CEO Jeremy Allaire was completing a major funding round that would enable the company to make strategic investments in some or all of several categories: technology, media distribution infrastructure, international expansion, and acquisitions. As Allaire and his fellow executives weighed those options, they confronted competitive threats in multiple quarters, but particularly from YouTube, a hugely popular video-sharing site that online search giant Google had recently acquired. Covers Brightcove's vision for its multi-sided business, its technology offering and early business model, its efforts to shift to a new model based on media distribution, and its chief competitors in that market space.